Why Covering The US In High-Speed Rail Makes No Sense At All

David
Levinson serves on the faculty of the Department of
Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota and
Director of the Networks, Economics, and Urban Systems
(NEXUS) research group. He holds the Richard P. Braun/CTS
Chair in Transportation. He also serves on the graduate
faculty of the Applied Economics and Urban and Regional
Planning programs at the University of Minnesota.

Recent Posts

Maps are powerful ideas. A map once drawn can be viewed as a
contract, a promise to build something. We live with
the ghosts
of maps drawn long ago. Unbuilt highways queue-up to get
built, even when their rationale has disappeared. But lines
remain unbuilt for a reason, people perceived the benefit did not
outweigh the cost. Of course, conditions can change, a line which
once failed a benefit-cost test may now pass it, or vice versa.

High-speed rail advocates have long assembled maps of proposed
routes. I have a collection of them here. These
all present different visions of the future, and they can't all
come to pass. But does that mean none of them should?

A private firm would build high-speed rail if the expected
profits exceeded the expected costs. Clearly that is not
generally the case in the United States, otherwise we would see
more evidence of this. There are certainly proposals, some
farther along than others. The most likely right now appears to
be the All
Aboard Florida project. I hope it succeeds.

The public sector remains uninterested in profit, but instead
should favor the more ambiguous general welfare. High-speed rail
makes sense when the full economic benefits outweigh the full
economic costs. The potential benefits include time savings for
travelers, increased reliability, improved quality of service,
reduced congestion on roadways and at airports, reduced pollution
from automobiles and airplanes, and more economic activity as a
result of the improved accessibility. The potential costs are
those of constructing the system, operating it, the pollution
costs associated with construction and operations, and so on.
The evidence is
that the capital costs of the new system do not outweigh
potential reductions in pollution.

The first map nicely draws with bright colors a possible United
States High Speed Rail System.

Actual ridership is highest in the Northeast corridor, where the
Acela service, along with other conventional passenger rail runs
today. The other big Amtrak markets are between San Diego and Los
Angeles, between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area,
between Seattle and Portland, and between Chicago and a variety
of midwestern cities, in particular St. Louis.

Corridors that get traffic now with relatively slow service are
more likely to get higher levels of demand when upgraded (made
faster and more frequent) than corridors that get almost no
ridership now. This argues for (1) incremental upgrades where the
benefits outweigh the costs, (2) focusing on specific proven
markets rather than trying to connect random large cities.

We should be looking for routes where train is more
cost-effective than either driving or taking an airplane. This
distance is certainly less than 600 miles for most of the US,
under current costs of travel. (Once we have proven we can
connect large places closer than 100 miles, we should connect
large places less than 200 miles, and then expand outward. We
should not start with a grand vision which will simply collapse
of its own weight). We should also be looking for routes with
large trip generators at either end.

Examining the
first map shows a lot of non-sensical routes. I can't rate them
in order of nonsensicalness, some are just too
problematic.

This is not to
say there are not segments which could productively be (and are)
served by rail. The Northeast corridor is one. Chicago to
Milwaukee is one. Los Angeles to San Diego is one. There are a
few others. The key point is they are local serving, and should
be locally supported. There is no need for US federal
involvement. If the projects are worthwhile, the states and
cities and private railroads should fund them. Almost all the
benefits are local, the costs should be borne by those who
benefit.

These segments can grow into systems that should be (1)
separately organized, managed, governed, and operated to improve
local responsiveness and reliability, and (2) allowed to evolve
organically based on incremental changes and extensions. We do
not ask San Francisco's BART to interline with Washington DC's
Metro, nor should we expect a useful local
service from Chicago to Champaign-Urbana to interline with a
potentially useful route from Richmond to Washington, DC. By
doing so you create dependencies (a blizzard in the Northeast
holds up train service in Illinois) without any advantages.

High-speed rail is a difficult proposition to begin with in the
United States. In the 50 years after it was opened in Japan, it
has yet to come to pass in the US. There are reasons for this,
beyond simple political obstinacy. The markets are different, the
conditions are different (when HSR was opened in Japan, its
airlines were highly regulated, e.g. Further, Japan has a much
higher overall population density.) The US has been unimpressed
with its passenger rail service for many decades (since well
before Amtrak was formed to pick up the pieces of private
passenger rail service), and has lost its rail-building and
train-building skill-base.

When we study successful technologies and networks (e.g. The
Internet, the London Underground), we see they grow from a seed,
and expand outward - not from the top down. This is natural, it
is risk-averse, it allows learning to occur before over-building.
Not all technologies or networks will succeed, it is best to
learn that early than after building a giant White Elephant.